This invention relates generally to accessing a hearing aid remotely without the use of any hearing aid manufacturer's software or hardware. Remote access allows for direct and third party marketing to individuals wearing hearing aids and provides a practical system and method that enables a hearing professional to access and adjust a patient's hearing aid attributes not only from a location that is geographically remote from the patient but also while the patient is located in a normal, real life environment that includes background noises or other factors which make hearing more difficult for a hearing impaired patient.
Modern hearing aids are available in which the audio amplifier circuits of the hearing aid are controlled by digital data processors and signal processors which are also capable of establishing two-way data communication connections with Bluetooth-enabled computing devices such as smartphones, other mobile devices and laptop computers although only some have this ability. Such hearing aids are essentially special purpose computers that store and run programs for wireless communication according to the Bluetooth protocols and also run programs for processing the audio input signals from the hearing aid's microphone before outputting the processed audio signal to the hearing aid's output speaker. These hearing aids also store hearing aid settings which are adjustable attributes for processing the audio signal according to the algorithms used by the programs and additionally store data collected by the hearing aid programs showing characteristics of the history of the use of the hearing aid by the patient. The particular data that is stored varies substantially among the hearing aids of different manufacturers. Nonetheless, as the number and types of hearing aid attributes and collected use history data have increased, hearing professionals are able to more precisely tailor a hearing aid's characteristics to the particular hearing needs of individual patients.
A hearing professional is able to select the hearing aid attributes for each particular hearing aid and store them in the hearing aid by “programming” or “adjusting” the hearing aid. It is common in the hearing aid technological field to use the words “programming” and “adjusting” interchangeably to refer to the professional function of selecting the appropriate attributes and causing them to be stored in the hearing aid. However, some in the technological field use the word “programming” to refer to the initial selection and storing of the attributes and use the word “adjusting” to refer to subsequent selection and storing that is performed after the initial “programming”. These two words are used interchangeably in this description.
Unfortunately, the current state of this technology requires a patient to make an appointment with a hearing professional and come into an office that has the necessary equipment, hardware and software for digitally or manually accessing the hearing aid data and adjusting one or more of the hearing aid settings. This personal appearance requirement imposes on the patient the inconvenience, expense and time consumption that are usually associated with travel to a remote location. This requirement is particularly problematic for patients that are not ambulatory, live in remote areas where hearing professionals are located at great distances to the patient, or live in developing countries where a hearing professional may not be available.
Additionally, the need to access and adjust the hearing aid settings while the patient is located at a professional office also limits the effectiveness of any adjustments. That limitation exists because an office is a relatively quiet and acoustically protected environment with no normal sounds, such as any of the diverse background noises from crowds, machines and other audio sources that exist as part of a patient's real life experiences. Instead, a hearing professional programs the patient's hearing aid in a quiet office environment using the specialized equipment provided by the manufacturer of the patient's hearing aid. Although the hearing aid professional exercises the best professional judgment that is possible in this protected environment, the actual effectiveness of the initial settings stored in the hearing aid by the hearing professional can only be experienced and evaluated by the patient after leaving the office and resuming the patient's normal life. The patient then must return over several weeks and sometimes months for follow-up appointments, which again requires travel to the office with a resulting repetition of the same inconvenience, expense and time consumption associated with office visits. During this return visit, the patient reports on the function of the hearing aid and the patient's experiences with it, and the hearing professional readjusts the hearing aid settings. Often, older patients have memory issues that prevent them from being able to accurately describe any issues they are having with their hearing aids.
Sometimes a patient has an initial bad experience with the hearing aid and the patient stops wearing it shortly after the first office visit. Sometimes the patient reports problems such as hearing dishes in a kitchen in an adjacent room better than the patient can hear a friend with whom the patient was having a conversation while sitting at the same table. The hearing professional then again uses professional judgement to estimate the appropriate settings changes that should be made to compensate for any problems described by the patient. This sequence of office visits for adjustment followed by a return to normal life and evaluation of the effectiveness of the adjustments is often repeated multiple times over a period of several weeks or in some cases several months until the patient is finally satisfied with the hearing aid or in some cases gives up and rejects the hearing aid. As a result, progress toward optimizing the settings for the hearing condition of the particular patient occurs in small increments and can be spread over an extensive time period.
Additionally, if a patient rejects the hearing aid, the patient is at risk for earlier and more severe cognitive issues. Research from leading institutions, such as Johns Hopkins, shows that patients, who have even a mild hearing loss and do not wear hearing aids, are at significantly increased risk for decreased cognitive abilities including earlier and more severe, short term memory loss, dementia, Alzheimer's, balance problems, and a decrease in the ability to understand speech. So when patients reject their hearing aids or are not properly fitted for whatever reasons, they are at risk for the cognitive issues stated above. Remote access provides more convenient fitting and programming which affords more opportunity for patients to be satisfied with their hearing aids and wear them, thus minimizing the potential increase in adverse cognitive effects.
There have been proposals in the prior art for adjusting some hearing aid settings by connecting a patient's hearing aid to a hearing professional over the internet. However, these proposals have been impractical and have not been widely adopted because they require that expensive specialized equipment be sent to and returned from each patient, they require that the patient have a computer, they require the patient to install specialized software, they require the patient to connect equipment, the settings that can be accessed and adjusted are limited and they lack sufficient convenience to be of practical use to a hearing aid patient. Most importantly, each manufacturer has its own hearing aid accessing hardware and software so the hearing aid patient is required to use the existing proprietary hearing aid hardware and software of their hearing aid's manufacturer's and that requires that the special hardware be shipped to the patient in order to access the hearing aid.
The present invention allows for remote access to a patient's hearing aids. The remote access of the invention: (1) does not require or use any existing manufacturers software, proprietary or non-proprietary, in order to access the hearing aid, provide marketing to the hearing aid, program the hearing aid, update the firmware of the hearing aid, or connect to third party partners and their offerings to patients; (2) makes it unnecessary to provide the patient with any special or custom hardware device for communicating with a Bluetooth-enabled hearing aid; (3) eliminates the need for office visits along with the inconvenience, expense and time consumption associated with travelling to the office of the hearing professional; (4) enables the hearing professional to hear a patient's initial complaint, adjust the adjustable hearing aid attributes or settings while the patient is located in a sound environment where the patient is currently experiencing a commonly encountered hearing problem, receive the patient's description of the effectiveness of the adjustment and make further adjustments and therefore more accurately compensate for the hearing problem in a real-life, real-time, single session with the patient; and (5) substantially shortens the lapse of time from initial physical fitting of the hearing aid to the patient until the hearing aid is satisfactorily adjusted to meet the patient's needs because more problem specific and environment specific adjustments can be accomplished in real time during each adjustment session with the hearing professional. The patient gets better results faster and therefore is more likely to acquire a more favorable perception of the hearing aid and its usefulness. That further results in greater use of and improved comfort with the hearing aid and therefore improves the patient's ability to maintain better cognitive functioning per the research.
Through the invention, hearing aid access and programming can be achieved remotely, and as such this invention eliminates the biggest barrier to online sales, which until this invention, was the lack of the ability to program the hearing aid by a hearing professional without having to go to the hearing professional's office.
This invention also affords the opportunity to provide hearing aids to patients in markets in developing countries and remote markets in any country that does not have hearing professionals that can program them on-site or without traveling great distances. With this invention, hearing aids can be sold through retailers and the programming can be performed by hearing professionals anywhere in the world.
There are additional problems solved by the invention. Sometimes a patient may wish to obtain the services of a different hearing professional for reasons such as the patient has moved, the preferred hearing professional is temporarily unavailable or dissatisfaction with the patient's current hearing professional. Currently such a change in the treating hearing professional requires a transfer of records from the office of the first hearing professional to the office of another. That process ordinarily takes several days and often requires substantial effort by the patient. The invention permits any hearing professional, including a newly employed hearing professional, to immediately access the most recent hearing aid settings of the patient and the patient's settings history and to do so with only the permission of the patient but without the necessity of participation by the patient in the transfer of the recent hearing aid settings and the settings history. The invention allows any hearing professional located anywhere in the world to quickly become familiar with the patient's needs so that the hearing professional can make advanced preparation for an adjustment session with the patient or even review the current and historical patient settings at the beginning of an adjustment session.
Furthermore, as stated above, a problem with adjusting the settings of a hearing aid while the patient is in the office of a hearing professional is that, in the office environment, there is none of the real-life background sounds encountered in normal life environments. But if a hearing aid were adjusted while the patient is in a normal life environment and the hearing professional is not in the same location, the hearing professional cannot experience and evaluate the background sounds. However, with the invention the hearing professional is able to hear the same background sounds that the patient is currently hearing in real time during an adjustment session with the patient even though the hearing professional is at a remote location. This allows the hearing professional to make a professional evaluation of those background sounds and aids in forming a judgment of the appropriate adjustments that should be made to the hearing aid settings. The patient can then describe to the hearing professional the result of the adjustment immediately after the adjustment is made so that further adjustments can be made immediately in response to the patient's description.